In the context of scaled up funding for climate change adaptation, it is very important to ensure the effectiveness, equity and efficiency of adaptation interventions. Robust monitoring and evaluation is an essential part of this, both to ensure that the prospective benefits of interventions are being realised and to help improve the design of future interventions. This paper is the first empirical assessment of monitoring and evaluation frameworks used by development cooperation agencies for projects and programmes with adaptation-specific or adaptation-related components. It presents analysis on 106 project documents across six bilateral development agencies. Based on this, it identifies the characteristics of monitoring and evaluation frameworks for adaptation and shares lessons learned on the choice and use of indicators for adaptation.